Some accuse movie of hyping climate fears

Some accuse movie of hyping climate fearsBy BEN SHOUSEbshouse@argusleader.comPublished: January 21, 2007The scientific debate over climate change has shifted from whether global warming exists to how bad it will be.Former vice president Al Gore is attracting fresh criticism about his depiction of climate science. A Wall Street Journal opinion piece Thursday raised the issue of the rate of sea level rise.Scientists say the melting of two major ice sheets, in Greenland and West Antarctica, largely will determine whether places such as New Orleans, lower Manhattan and Bangladesh remain habitable.In his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore argues that such places are under threat from accelerating ice melt. In the Journal piece, political scientist and environmental author Bjorn Lomborg argues that Gore hypes the science.The bottom line, according to studies of the ice sheets published in the journal Science last year, is that nobody knows how fast that ice will melt.Some glaciers in Greenland are moving toward the ocean twice as fast today as in 2000. If the glaciers maintain speed, sea level could rise by half a meter - about 20 inches - by 2100.But a study from March 2006 says the decline of the ice sheets could accelerate, and "a threshold triggering many meters of sea-level rise could be crossed well before the end of this century."Jihong Cole-Dai, an environmental chemist at South Dakota State University, has seen Gore's movie. He said it wasn't exaggerated, but it does look at the extreme scenarios."So the question might be, how likely is an extreme scenario compared to an average but more likely scenario," he said.He says it is important to consider the possibility that sea level rise will speed up."If you warm up the planet just slightly, it may not be enough to melt the entire ice sheet. But if you melt just the bottom of it, a big chunk of that ice could slide into the ocean, and that would have the same effect of melting the whole thing."Reach Ben Shouse at 331-2318.http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070121/NEWS01/701210304